by GRP Runner Phil Royer

A December marathon is a lesson in patience. You start to build while the heat still makes long runs difficult. You hit your stride right when the crisp fall air makes running feel effortless. But as November rolls around, the days grow short and the legs grow heavy from the mileage. The workouts start to blend together. Was it ten by mile, twenty by quarter, or four-three-two-one? There are only so many ways you can divide up the intervals, and the tempo runs are a weekly ritual that never seems to get easier. So how do you balance the monotony of repetition with the need to maintain the essentials? I want to share one of my favorites, which I affectionately call “the long middle thing”.

The Workout

• Four miles at marathon pace

• Twelve miles at ten percent slower than marathon pace

• Four miles at marathon pace again

Why it works

I don’t know for sure that it does. But if it does work, it probably works because the marathon is too long a distance to suffer the whole way, unless you possess the mental toughness of Sammy Wanjiru or Emil Zatopek. For most of us, the only way to do well in the marathon is to achieve a state of grace for some portion of the race, and only push up against our limits during the last hour when the end is in sight.

So this workout is designed to simulate the long middle section of the marathon where your only goal is to mentally hibernate and stay relatively fresh for the hard part at the end. If you can shut your mind off and prevent it from burning those all-important sugar molecules, you will find you have much more in the tank when the racing really starts.

Another way to think of it is that most of us don’t really “race” the marathon. We just try to stay within ourselves for the first twenty miles, then if we are having a phenomenal day we earn the chance to race the last six. The goal of this workout is to practice getting through the middle miles with less effort than before.

When it works

This one is meant for late in the marathon cycle, perhaps just two or three weeks out. It is not “The Big One” by any means, but it is no small effort either. Unless you are a mega mileage person, this probably counts as your long run for the week, and might even be a good candidate for your longest session of the build or your last long run. Either way, you probably want to avoid it early in the cycle because it works best when marathon pace is starting to feel more and more comfortable. And you want to have the mileage to support this amount of volume so the last section is not just an exercise in hanging on for dear life.

How it works

See the section called “why it works”.

How to work it

The warmup

For most marathon workouts I like to take a nice long four or five mile warmup. It loosens up the joints, relaxes the mind, and if nothing else it pads the weekly mileage total. But for some of these sessions that are a combination of a workout and a long run, particularly ones that take place toward the end of the cycle, I do like to occasionally start with a very short warmup that simulates race day. I don’t want to get to the cold morning of the race and feel completely out of my element accelerating off the line, and of course the race is long enough that I don’t want to take a long warmup on the day. So if you are feeling up to it, and the weather isn’t too cold, considering hopping right in with only a 10 minute jog and a stride or two. 

The intro

If the training is on track and you are having a pretty good day, the first four miles should not feel too hard. For me the heart rate monitor should read a bit under 170, and my breathing should be steady. I always expect the first mile to hurt a little bit more than I want, but by the second or third it should start to get easier, and then you are almost done. Just don’t push it too hard here.

The long middle thing

While the workout is named after this section, there really isn’t anything special going on here. I find marathon pace plus ten percent to be a nice middle zone; it’s on the higher end of the aerobic range but still a safe distance from threshold. During the workout this can feel a bit odd, because workout mode gets you all geared up to run fast, but then settling into this slower pace can feel anticlimactic.

Give it some time, though, because the combination of the four miles before and the sheer volume of time spent here can make it a bit tough in its own way. This is also the most mentally important part of the workout, because the anticipation of the hard part at the end is hanging over you, and your ability to block that out and not get ahead of yourself will be very important on race day. Don’t forget to bring some gels and practice your fueling during this long section.

The end

When it comes time to get back to marathon pace, give yourself a little shout and a fist pump to get the blood flowing again. Imagine you are at the big race and you are starting to hit the downtown section where the fans get loud. If you are going to run a full 26.2 at your goal marathon pace, your mind needs to teach your legs that you can run that pace no matter what your legs feel like, and your legs need to teach your mind that you can run that pace no matter how your mind feels.

Either way, you need to run the pace. This last section is not about going all out to see how fast you can run. It is about finding the magic pace that you can sustain all the way to the end, and still feel like you could do a few more after if you really needed to.